The Utopia Challenge

At Moogfest, Public Science Agency debuted a workshop developed that integrated social and affective elements into the computational and digital. It was a game where groups of people represented different parts of the governing body of a country (name-cards) used their political capital (paper clips) to enact public policy (cards that are worth certain amounts of political capital) in order to reach utopia. We run the chosen policies against a simulation of what the people of that country want, then reward political capital back to the individuals. At Moogfest there were two teams, and the team with the highest score won. Players got into their roles and said that advocating for a view that they personally disagreed with actually made them feel slightly more empathetic to that cause.